Apply for New Style Employment and Support Allowance beta reassessment report
The report for the Department for Work and Pensions' Apply online for New Style Employment and Support Allowance beta assessment on 15 October 2020.
| From: | Government Digital Service |
| Reassessment date: | 15/10/20 |
| Stage: | Beta |
| Result: | Met |
| Service provider: | Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) |
Previous assessment reports
Service description
The service enables citizens to submit an application for ‘New Style’ (NS) Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), a benefit for people who are ill or have a health condition or disability that limits their ability to work. This information in the digital application will be used to create and make a decision on a claim in the legacy system JSAPS. Claim data will be entered onto JSAPS using a combination of Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) agent rekey and an automated robotic process. As a result of coronavirus (COVID-19), DWP have experienced unprecedented levels of citizen contact by their telephone service and there is a clear need to develop a digital service that will support those who are digitally capable to apply for New Style ESA.
Service users
Citizens who are unable to work due to illness (including coronavirus) / injury and who have paid sufficient national insurance contributions in the relevant two tax years prior to their claim.
DWP agents will use an agent UI with the service.
1. Understand user needs
Decision
The service met point 1 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the team has continued to conduct research since the last appointment with end users, internal members of staff and third parties
- based on the research data and analytics data the team has developed personas and considerably expanded their understanding of user needs
- the team has also created detailed user journeys to help communicate existing issues that the end users are facing
- the team has included in their research people with low digital skills
- there is now a clear decision on why the coronavirus case is currently treated as a separate journey
What the team needs to explore
Before their next assessment, the team needs to:
- consider expanding the use of personas and use them to develop recruitment strategies for user research
- include in their research people with diverse access needs
2. Do ongoing user research
Decision
The service met point 2 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the researcher has been very creative with finding a way to overcome existing DWP restrictions on screen sharing during research sessions
- the team has conducted a considerable amount of research sessions since the last assessment
- the team has a thorough research plan in place on what they want to focus on during the next stage of the service development
- the team is proactively including data from analytics and call centres to answer research questions
- the team is collaborating with other DWP services developing teams to further their knowledge about the end users
What the team needs to explore
Before their next assessment, the team needs to:
- explore, with wider DWP digital, the constraints around screen sharing - constraining the team from screen sharing during remote research sessions poses the biggest barrier and risk that the team is facing
- find a solution, with the support of DWP, to share the screen while working remotely - considering that applicants to new style ESA are likely to also include cases where people are at high risk from the virus, remote research is likely to continue to be the default working solution for the team
- continue to review their research plan regularly, especially in the context of policy change
- continue to work closely with internal stakeholders and share their research findings with policy teams to inform potential changes to the policy
- conduct future usability testing on mobile phones and tablets especially considering that the majority of people are likely to apply online on such devices
- prioritise conducting remote sessions with people with access needs to identify any accessibility issues
Some sources of information:
- conducting remote sessions with people with access needs
- the department could also consider purchasing mobile devices that can be sent out to participants for the research sessions and then collected back via courier at the end of the session
5. Iterate and improve frequently
Decision
The service met point 5 of the Standard.
This point of the standard was previously met and the following information is to highlight the additional work undertaken by the team.
The team explained that they are under major change with implementing CI/CD tooling, which is part of the key element to achieve zero downtime deployment. The team explained that they are achieving 99.9% uptime at the moment even without zero downtime deployment.
The team explained their infrastructure uptime was higher because of high availability provisioning.
What the team needs to explore
Before their next assessment, the team needs to:
- note that zero downtime deployment is one of the criteria for passing live assessment - the team needs to be able to explain how they achieve this as well as providing uptime statistics in the live assessment
7. Understand security and privacy issues
The team explained since the last assessment there is a separate security team set up to perform internal IT Health Check (ITHC) for both applications and infrastructure, and additional tests are built in CI/CD to check vulnerability of the service.
Decision
The service met point 7 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the team has taken proactive steps to ensure their security posture
- the team has actioned a privacy notice as recommended in the last assessment
- the team has performed an external ITHC
What the team needs to explore
Before their next assessment, the team needs to:
- establish a concrete security assurance process, including regularly performing ITHC for example, yearly and during major changes, using both internal and external security assurance resources
- have the process endorsed by Information Assurance (IA) and Senior Information Risk Owner (SIRO)
8. Make all new source code open
The team explained they made a significant step towards changing the culture of making source codes open.
Decision
The service met point 8 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- guidelines and processes to make all new source codes open were created
- started the process to make the old source codes open
- the team has started changing the open sourcing culture in DWP
What the team needs to explore
Before their next assessment, the team needs to:
- continue the good work
12: Make sure users succeed first time
Decision
The service met point 12 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the team was able to demonstrate several examples of improvements they have made to the service which resulted in a higher completion rate resulting in a circa 76% completion rate to date
- the team has clear, well formulated ideas for how they will continue to improve the service based on the data that is available to them
- while the service has a 97% digital take-up rate, the service also has an established assisted digital service and they are considering design options to be able to surface the phone number to users throughout the user journey should they need support
What the team needs to explore
Before their next assessment, the team needs to:
- continue to unblock the ability to track numbers of appeals and successful and unsuccessful ESA claims in order to truly measure success for users
- be sure they are not optimising conversion funnels at the cost of getting incorrect or incomplete information from users
- continue to work closely with DWP employees who assess the application in order to ensure the design of the form and questions are giving them the information they need to make a decision
- continue to contribute to cross-DWP work to ensure users are better able to find which benefit will best suit their personal circumstances
15. Collect performance data
Decision
The service met point 15 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the team is collecting data from a range of data sources including telephony data, robotics data, performance monitoring data, survey data as well as web analytics data through google analytics
- through the use of google tag manager the team was able to implement custom scripts to help analyse post code error rates without passing sensitive data to the analytics tool
- the team can calculate the median average time on page and journey completion times by analysing session level data - this is helping to highlight pain-points to identify areas to conduct more research
- the team holds a session each sprint where the digital performance analyst will meet the rest of the team, review the KPIs and develop hypotheses to test
What the team needs to explore
Before their next assessment, the team needs to:
- work to improve the data collection methods for metrics that sit outside the digital service team, as defined in the performance framework
- continue to capture and analyse ‘uncertainty metrics’ and look to build hypotheses and iterate the service/conduct further qualitative research, based around these findings
- capture the final outcome of the NS ESA decision and link this back to the digital service, as some iterations to the service, although increasing conversion rate, may lead to a higher rejection rate, for example
- investigate working with other areas of DWP to enhance the analysis of customer feedback through NLP techniques - this will reduce the workload of the team members responsible for extracting and coding this data manually
17. Report performance data on the Performance Platform
Decision
The service met point 17 of the Standard.
The team is not publishing data on the performance platform due to no new dashboards being currently developed for any services.
What the team needs to explore
Before their next assessment, the team needs to:
- identify other methods of publishing data about the service
- investigate if https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/dwp-benefits-statistics-august-2020/dwp-benefits-statistics-august-2020 could be updated including a split between ‘legacy’ and ‘new’
18. Test with the minister
Decision
The service met point 18 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the team have tested with senior stakeholders
- a plan is in place to test with the minister and a submission is ready to go
What the team needs to explore
Before their next assessment, the team needs to:
- make sure the service has been tested with the minister